We demonstrate a next-generation high-capacity mobile fronthaul based on radio over fiber (RoF) technology, which links between a digital unit and a radio unit supporting two frequency assignments and multiple input, multiple output antennas. To confirm the technical feasibility of a mobile fronthaul, we experimentally investigate its down- and uplink end-to-end performances including the optical and radio frequency (RF) signal path. Frequency-dependent performance deviations, error vector magnitude variations, overall system performance variations caused by optical to electrical conversion, and intermediate frequency to RF conversions are examined. Experimental verifications on multiple LTE uplink signals are performed for the first time. We also demonstrate several commercial mobile Internet services, YouTube video streaming, and file transfers using off-the-shelf mobile devices, through a mobile fronthaul based on RoF.

Network densification is regarded as the dominant driver for wireless evolution into the era of 5G. However, in this context, interference-limited dense small cell deployments are facing technical challenges in mobility management. The recently announced results from an LTE field test conducted in a dense urban area show a handover failure (HOF) rate of over 21%. A major cause of HOFs is the transmission failure of handover command (HO CMD) messages. In this paper, we propose two enhancements to HO performance in LTE networks - radio link failure-proactive HO, which helps with the reliable transmission of HO CMD messages while the user equipment is under a poor radio link condition, and Early Handover Preparation with Ping-Pong Avoidance (EHOPPPA) HO, which assures reliable transmission of HO CMD under a good radio link condition. We analyze the HO performance of EHOPPPA HO theoretically, and perform simulations to compare the performance of the proposed schemes with that of standard LTE HO. We show that they can decrease the HOF rate to nearly zero through an analysis, and based on the simulation results, by over 70%, without increasing the ping-pong probability.

This paper presents a general-purpose design scheme of a filter bank (FB)-based radio frequency (RF) transceiver that operates across the entire ultra-high frequency (UHF) TV band from 470 MHz to 698 MHz and complies with the TV white space (TVWS) regulatory requirements. To this end, an intermediate frequency (IF) band-pass filter (BPF) with a sharp skirt characteristic is considered as a solution for handling the incoming signals from a baseband modem. Specifically, an FB-based BPF structure with four ceramic resonator filters that effectively rejects unwanted signals is proposed to extract a desired signal in the TV band. Achievable data rates of a cognitive radio system (CRS) employing the proposed FB-based RF transceiver at the application layer are investigated in both wired and wireless environments. The service coverage of the CRS network is measured according to several modulation and coding schemes (MCSs) of the CRS. The results show that the coverage of a wireless network in a nearly open area can be extended by more than 9.3 km in the TVWS. Experimental results also confirm that the proposed FB-based RF transceiver is adequate for utilization in TVWS applications.

Mobility management is important in mobile cellular networks. In this study, we considered an enhanced location-based registration (ELR) method. In the ELR method, even when a mobile phone enters a cell to find that the cell is already on its list (of visited cells) and then updates its main counter, it does not remove any cells from the list (memory space permitting), which gives better performance than the location-based registration (LR) method. However, the location registration cost of the ELR method is still high, and there is a lot of room for improvement with regards to this matter. We now propose an improved version of the ELR method; namely, the improved ELR (iELR). In the iELR method, when a mobile phone enters a cell to find that the cell counter value is less than the main counter value, or when a mobile phone enters a cell to register its location, it updates the main counter and the cell counter values as much as possible to reduce the future need for registrations. We show that our proposed iELR method provides better performance than the ELR method.

This paper presents a dynamic retry adaptation scheme for H.264 HD video, called DRAS.264, which dynamically adjusts the retry limits of frames at the medium access control (MAC) layer according to the impact those frames have on the streamed H.264 HD video. DRAS.264 is further improved with a bandwidth estimation technique, better prediction of packet delays, and expanded results covering multi-slice video. Our study is performed using the Open Evaluation Framework for Video Over Networks as a simulation environment for various congestion scenarios. Results show improvements in average peak signal-to-noise ratios of up to 4.45 dB for DRAS.264 in comparison to the default MAC layer operation. Furthermore, the ability of DRAS.264 to prioritize data of H.264 bitstreams reduces error propagation during video playback, leading to noticeable visual improvements.

Multicast communication of mobile ad hoc networks is vulnerable to internal attacks due to its routing structure and high scalability of its participants. Though existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs) act smartly to defend against attack strategies, adversaries also accordingly update their attacking plans intelligently so as to intervene in successful defending schemes. In our work, we present a novel indirect internal stealthy attack on a tree-based multicast routing protocol. Such an indirect stealthy attack intelligently makes neighbor nodes drop their routing-layer unicast control packets instead of processing or forwarding them. The adversary targets the collision avoidance mechanism of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to indirectly affect the routing layer process. Simulation results show the success of this attacking strategy over the existing "stealthy attack in wireless ad hoc networks: detection and countermeasure (SADEC)" detection system. We design a cross-layer automata-based stealthy attack on multicast routing protocols (SAMRP) attacker detection system to identify and isolate the proposed attacker. NS-2 simulation and analytical results show the efficient performance, against an indirect internal stealthy attack, of SAMRP over the existing SADEC and BLM attacker detection systems.

We propose a pseudo optical N-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PO PAM-N) signal using a few externally-modulated lasers (EMLs) operating at different wavelengths, which is suitable for upgrading the transmission speed over an optical link of < 10 km single-mode fiber with low-cost components. To compare a PO PAM-N signal with that of a standard optical PAM-N signal, we perform experiments for evaluating the performance of a 51.56-Gb/s PO PAM-4 signal and standard 51.56-Gb/s optical PAM-4 signal. The receiver sensitivity (at ) of the PO PAM-4 signal is 1.5 dB better than the receiver sensitivity of a standard optical PAM-4 signal. We also investigate the feasibility of PO PAM-N (N = 4, 8, and 16) signals operating at 103.12 Gb/s, considering relative intensity noise, timing jitter, extinction ratio (ER) of EMLs, and dispersion. From the results, a PO PAM-8 signal performs better than PO PAM-4 and PO PAM-16 signals at 103.12 Gb/s. Finally, we suggest a timing control method to suppress the effect of dispersion in a PO PAM-N signal. We show that the tolerance to dispersion of a 103.12-Gb/s PO PAM-8 signal can be improved to by applying a proposed scheme.

In this article, a study of a flower like nanostructured CdS buffer layer for improving the performance of a submicron-thick (CIGS) solar cell (SC) is presented. Both its synthesis and properties are discussed in detail. The surface reflectance of the device is dramatically decreased. SCs with flower like nanostructured CdS buffer layers enhance short-circuit current density, fill factor, and open-circuit voltage. These enhancements contribute to an increase in power conversion efficiency of about 55% on average compared to SCs that don't have a flower like nanostructured CdS buffer layer, despite them both having the same CIGS light absorbing layer.

Multilayered ZnO- heterostructure thin films consisting of ZnO and layers are produced by alternating the pulsed laser ablation of ZnO and targets, and their structural and field-effect electronic transport properties are investigated as a function of the thickness of the ZnO and layers. The performance parameters of amorphous multilayered ZnO- heterostructure thin-film transistors (TFTs) are highly dependent on the thickness of the ZnO and layers. A highest electron mobility of , a low subthreshold swing of a 0.22 V/dec, a threshold voltage of 1 V, and a high drain current on-to-off ratio of are obtained for the amorphous multilayered ZnO(1.5nm)-(1.5 nm) heterostructure TFTs, which is adequate for the operation of next-generation microelectronic devices. These results are presumed to be due to the unique electronic structure of amorphous multilayered ZnO- heterostructure film consisting of ZnO, , and ZnO- interface layers.

In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for a real-time image stitching engine for vision SoCs found in motor vehicles. To enlarge the obstacle-detection distance and area for safety, we adopt panoramic images from multiple telegraphic cameras. We propose a stitching method based on a fixed homography that is educed from the initial frame of a video sequence and is used to warp all input images without regeneration. Because the fixed homography is generated only once at the initial state, we can calculate it using SW to reduce HW costs. The proposed warping HW engine is based on a linear transform of the pixel positions of warped images and can reduce the computational complexity by 90% or more as compared to a conventional method. A dual-core SW/HW image stitching engine is applied to stitching input frames in parallel to improve the performance by 70% or more as compared to a single-core engine operation. In addition, a dual-core structure is used to detect a failure in state machines using rock-step logic to satisfy the ISO26262 standard. The dual-core SW/HW image stitching engine is fabricated in SoC with 254,968 gate counts using Global Foundry's 65 nm CMOS process. The single-core engine can make panoramic images from three YCbCr 4:2:0 formatted VGA images at 44 frames per second and frequency of 200 MHz without an LCD display.

This paper proposes a fully sensorless driver for a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) integrated with a digital motor controller and an analog pre-driver, including sensing circuits and estimators. In the motor controller, a position estimator estimates the back electromotive force and rotor position using a sliding-mode observer. In the pre-driver, drivers for the power devices are designed with a level shifter and isolation technique. In addition, a current sensing circuit measures a three-phase current. All of these circuits are integrated in a single chip such that the driver achieves control of the speed with high accuracy. Using an IC fabricated using a BCDMOS process, the performance was verified experimentally. The driver showed stable operation in spite of the variation in speed and load, a similar efficiency near 1% compared to a commercial driver, a low speed error of about 0.1%, and therefore good performance for the PMSM drive.

This paper presents an advanced sensorless permanent magnet (PM) brushless motor controller integrated circuit (IC) employing an automatic lead-angle compensator. The proposed IC is composed of not only a sensorless sine-wave motor controller but also an isolated gate-driver and current self-sensing circuit. The fabricated IC operates in sensorless mode using a position estimator based on a sliding mode observer and an open-loop start-up. For high efficiency PM brushless motor driving, an automatic lead-angle control algorithm is employed, which improves the efficiency of a PM brushless motor system by tracking the minimum copper loss under various load and speed conditions. The fabricated IC is evaluated experimentally using a commercial 200 W PM brushless motor and power switches. The proposed IC is successfully operated without any additional sensors, and the proposed algorithm maintains the minimum current and maximum system efficiency under to load conditions. The proposed IC is a feasible sensorless speed controller for various applications with a wide range of load and speed conditions.

This work proposes a highly efficient sensorless motor driver chip for various permanent-magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) in a wide power range. The motor driver chip is composed of two important parts. The digital part is a sensorless controller consisting mainly of an angle estimation block and a speed control block. The analog part consists of a gate driver, which is able to sense the phase current of a motor. The sensorless algorithms adapted in this paper include a sliding mode observer (SMO) method that has high robust characteristics regarding parameter variations of PMSMs. Fabricated SMO chips detect back electromotive force signals. Furthermore, motor current-sensing blocks are included with a 10-bit successive approximation analog-to-digital converter and various gain current amplifiers for proper sensorless operations. Through a fabricated SMO chip, we were able to demonstrate rated powers of 32 W, 200 W, and 1,500 W.

In this paper, a multi-time programmable (MTP) cell based on a bipolar-CMOS-DMOS backbone process that can be written into by using dual pumping voltages - VPP (boosted voltage) and VNN (negative voltage) - is used to design MTP memories without high voltage devices. The used MTP cell consists of a control gate (CG) capacitor, a TG_SENSE transistor, and a select transistor. To reduce the MTP cell size, the tunnel gate (TG) oxide and sense transistor are merged into a single TG_SENSE transistor; only two p-wells are used - one for the TG_SENSE and sense transistors and the other for the CG capacitor; moreover, only one deep n-well is used for the 256-bit MTP cell array. In addition, a three-stage voltage level translator, a VNN charge pump, and a VNN precharge circuit are newly proposed to secure the reliability of 5 V devices. Also, a dual memory structure, which is separated into a designer memory area of and a user memory area of , is newly proposed in this paper.

Automatic emotion recognition based on facial cues, such as facial action units (AUs), has received huge attention in the last decade due to its wide variety of applications. Current computer-based automated two-phase facial emotion recognition procedures first detect AUs from input images and then infer target emotions from the detected AUs. However, more robust AU detection and AU-to-emotion mapping methods are required to deal with the error accumulation problem inherent in the multiphase scheme. Motivated by our key observation that a single AU detector does not perform equally well for all AUs, we propose a novel two-phase facial emotion recognition framework, where the presence of AUs is detected by group decisions of multiple AU detectors and a target emotion is inferred from the combined AU detection decisions. Our emotion recognition framework consists of three major components - multiple AU detection, AU detection fusion, and AU-to-emotion mapping. The experimental results on two real-world face databases demonstrate an improved performance over the previous two-phase method using a single AU detector in terms of both AU detection accuracy and correct emotion recognition rate.

In a hidden Markov model-based speech synthesis system using a two-band excitation model, a maximum voiced frequency (MVF) is the most important feature as an excitation parameter because the synthetic speech quality depends on the MVF. This paper proposes an enhanced MVF estimation scheme based on a peak picking method. In the proposed scheme, both local peaks and peak lobes are picked from the spectrum of a linear predictive residual signal. The average of the normalized distances of local peaks and peak lobes is calculated and utilized as a feature to estimate an MVF. Experimental results of both objective and subjective tests show that the proposed scheme improves the synthetic speech quality compared with that of a conventional one in a mobile device as well as a PC environment.

An autonomous valet parking (AVP) system is designed to locate a vacant parking space and park the vehicle in which it resides on behalf of the driver, once the driver has left the vehicle. In addition, the AVP is able to direct the vehicle to a location desired by the driver when requested. In this paper, for an AVP system, we introduce technology to recognize a parking space using image sensors. The proposed technology is mainly divided into three parts. First, spatial analysis is carried out using a height map that is based on dense motion stereo. Second, modelling of road markings is conducted using a probability map with a new salient-line feature extractor. Finally, parking space recognition is based on a Bayesian classifier. The experimental results show an execution time of up to 10 ms and a recognition rate of over 99%. Also, the performance and properties of the proposed technology were evaluated with a variety of data. Our algorithms, which are part of the proposed technology, are expected to apply to various research areas regarding autonomous vehicles, such as map generation, road marking recognition, localization, and environment recognition.

In this study, we investigate the relationship between emotions and the physiological responses, with emotion recognition, using the proposed fuzzy information granulation-based neural network (FIGNN) for boredom, pain, and surprise emotions. For an analysis of the physiological responses, three emotions are induced through emotional stimuli, and the physiological signals are obtained from the evoked emotions. To recognize the emotions, we design an FIGNN recognizer and deal with the feature selection through an analysis of the physiological signals. The proposed method is accomplished in premise, consequence, and aggregation design phases. The premise phase takes information granulation using fuzzy c-means clustering, the consequence phase adopts a polynomial function, and the aggregation phase resorts to a general fuzzy inference. Experiments show that a suitable methodology and a substantial reduction of the feature space can be accomplished, and that the proposed FIGNN has a high recognition accuracy for the three emotions using physiological signals.

It is very important to provide a parameterized quality of service (QoS) using traffic specification (TSPEC), such as mean data rate, maximum burst size, and peak data rate, when packets from the application layer need to be transmitted with guaranteed services in a high-rate wireless personal area network (HR-WPAN). As medium resources are limited, the optimal medium time required for each device needs to be estimated to share the resources efficiently among devices. This paper proposes a variable-service interval-based resource allocation algorithm to efficiently make a reservation of medium resources based on a parameterized QoS. In other words, the proposed algorithm calculates the number of medium access slots (MASs) based on TSPEC, local resources, and local conditions and determines suitable locations for the MASs within a superframe to accommodate more devices. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accommodate more devices and has greater than 10% resource allocation efficiency in an HR-WPAN compared to existing schemes.

We investigate an image recovery method for sparse-view computed tomography (CT) using an iterative shrinkage algorithm based on a second-order approach. The two-step iterative shrinkage-thresholding (TwIST) algorithm including a total variation regularization technique is elucidated to be more robust than other first-order methods; it enables a perfect restoration of an original image even if given only a few projection views of a parallel-beam geometry. We find that the incoherency of a projection system matrix in CT geometry sufficiently satisfies the exact reconstruction principle even when the matrix itself has a large condition number. Image reconstruction from fan-beam CT can be well carried out, but the retrieval performance is very low when compared to a parallel-beam geometry. This is considered to be due to the matrix complexity of the projection geometry. We also evaluate the image retrieval performance of the TwIST algorithm -sing measured projection data.